Nelson seems a funny little thing at a tier with good MM. But I already have the Missi which satisfies all my Credit needs ever.
But the Conq WILL get nerfed if they release it in the current configuration. It is WAY too easy to play it well, I'd say even easier than Yamato because of the stealth and the good maneuverability. The HE means that potatoes get away with brainless HE only spam.
On top of this everyone got a really good special Captain for it. Consequently the average damage numbers will skyrocket.

Yamato: 20Montana: 19Großer Kurfürst : 25Zao: 21Des Moines: 23Hindenburg: 27 - Hindi seems to have it all right now. Can snipe well, is even better at medium range, can brawl quite well too. German Hydro is a very nice gimmick. Probably the top pick till the Conq arrives to kill everything.Moskva: 17Minotaur: 20Shimakaze: 13Grozovoi: 5 - This ship has no place among the other listed ships. It can not carry battles and doesn't even serve as a potential damage sponge like the Khaba.Khabarovsk: 16 Hakuryu: 18

Yamato: 20Montana: 19Großer Kurfürst : 25Zao: 24Des Moines: 23Hindenburg: 26 Moskva: 16Minotaur: 20Shimakaze: 13Grozovoi: 8 - good guns, good torps, good speed, good AA but.. well, nothing is actually great on this ship and we are beyond the point where being good is good enough.Khabarovsk: 16 Hakuryu: 18 - not enough CV players here. This ship can carry battles more than anything.

Imho, with very few exceptions, Cruisers lines are only worth it at tier X. At least all the grinding prooves to be worth it in the end.
Exceptions (above tier IV, go away filthy seal clubbers):
1. Fiji - an almost tier VIII ship at tier VII where MM is glorious currently
2. Myoko - again, tier VII means glorious MM and the Myoko is super tanky when top tier with brutal firepower
3. Chapayev - radar ranger greater than detection range. With the radar module you are the bane of DDs and a good long range firestarter if you must
4. Cleveland - IF you can position well behind islands. Clevelands dpm is really great but it dies fast
as well as most tier IXs (except I-boooh-ki) but imho none of the tier IXs is a keeper when you can play the tier Xs instead.

C hull is a must have. WGs ratings are alas quite useless. For instance, equipping the top hull on Clemson gives like +2 on guns rating despite the fact that you get double thge guns in each turret...
The C hull gives you much better armor and the gun placement is wy more convenient.
Still IJN CAs suffer from very bad turret traverse all the line up and that is something you need to work around. Pre turn your turrets whenever possible and turn the hull if you are not getting aimed at. Maximising Cit hits is basically aiming correct AND shooting often and the shotting often part is actually much harder as it mean that you need to position well.
Still, IJN CAs have good concealment and if you get targetted by too many BBs, hold your fire and vanish into stealth till said BBs found other targets to shoot at.

Bear in mind that this is for good players who can actually use the viewrange and position themselves correctly in every stage of the game. In WoT a Unicum and a Potatoe that rush the open field on Malinovka at the start of the game will fare almost exactly the same... What divides the Unicorns from the unwashed masses is that they know what to do and what not to do on very map, in every tank, with every team, at every stage of the battle.
So while you should totally do swap vents for optics, don't expect to rule Mali/Prokh instantly. You will likely need quite some games to experience first hand what this change means and some trial and error what now works and what doesn't.

Thats the new and improved natural cycle of tank balancing. New tanks will always be more or less OP till everyone grinded them and then they get nerfed to be unexciting, so most people don't hesitate to move on. Then, after a while, they change it's playstyle around to make it interesting for people that so far didn'Ät see the need to get it.
With this method you maximise the amount of people that want a tank at the cost of some people who hate nerfs and inconsistency

Yes, indeed. WoT is mainly paid by the older generation (like me) who do not follow an esports scene too keenly. On top of that WoT also doesn't lend itself for competitive esports because of the randomness involved as well as the general format.

All rating systems that work that way adjust the MM according to the results of previous matches.
In other words: ELO works because the MM uses the ELO-rating to create matches.
This is not true for WoT. Furthermore you can not poll the WoT API for matches, only for overall and per tanks. So you can't even construct a recent rating from the API alone (you would need to poll tank for tank, save the results and then poll tank for tank again and measure the differences - quite a lot of effort).
So it all boils down to the fact that the effort to construct a database for a "good" rating is way too much effort for the improvement of quality over WN8.

Indeed. This was changed bc invisifire from long range was deemed detrimental for the game (which I agree upon).
However BBs imho have way too good stealth currently. It is almost universally beneficial for BBs to take CE as their first rank 4 captain skill and this is certainly not working as intended.

BBs have the highest average damage but in this case it seems to be that you play your Aoba below it's potential. Cruisers are hard to play when there are so many BBs around though. In the case of IJN CAs you ned to play around the good concealment of these ships in order to mitiggrate the ultra bad turret traverse. The ships are relatively sturdy though. As with all non french CAs you hug island cover whenever possible and play passively till the field has cleared a bit and you have more room to angle against BBs.
Dunkirk event. These can be used in PvE only (but they were only good for the special Dunkirk event) but the 19 Pts Captains that come with them can be used on any ship of the appropiate nation. And because they have 19 Pts they generate free Captains exp, which is nice.
But don't get too attached to either of these as they will be removed after the event ends.

Stock Nagato is quite ok. Tier VII MM is often top tier and the guns and range are very workable there. I very much prefer Spotter Planes now on BBs for into smoke sniping. The extra range also helps alot whenever you are thrown into the occasional tier IX battle.

BBs are all about punishing broadsides and thus if I see a broadsiding target (or, in higher tiers, a target that is about to broadside) I have a small window of opportunity to punish that target hard. Again, the higher the tier, the smaller the window.
This means I fire all my guns in a frenzy of double clicking

Uhm, sorry if I miss something but:
If you have a sufficient number of battles then it is VERY likely that your average team mates and the average opponent winrate is THE SAME for everyone.
So how is using that is making a good rating even if you could access the info?

The thing is that 3-5-7 is a crutch that WG uses in order to avoid changing the really important things, such as prem ammo and low tier tanks being hilariously weak.
Also 3-5-7 imho has more than "small issues". Playing in any sort of platoon below tier IX means you are almost certainly among the 7. Tier VIII on EU, depending on the time of day, gets into tier X way more than half of the time. Not fun.

The new MM is WGs usual inept answer to three problems without fixing these four problems:
1. Tier balance: Yes, I know, being low tiers sucks puprosefully in order to incite everyone to get that more powerful tank on one hand and to give potatoes their moment of glory every 10th game. It worked long enough when the MM pyramid was still normal, but it isn't any more. So WG could have balanced tiers better but they didn't.
2. Prem ammo / armor: WG wanted to make armor more useful and the logical thing would have been to change how (prem) ammo works. Instead WG overbuffed armor and made it so that when top tier you mostly meet low tier tanks that your armor is good against.
3. Maps: too small! If you compare tier III tanks to tier X tanks it is simply insane that both play on mostly the same maps. WG needs to redesign maps and make maps larger for higher tiers. This would also make lower tiers different from high tiers and overall the game would be more varied. But most of all it would give lower tier tanks some room to maneuver. But now you roll to the only spot you can be in and meet that E100 - in your King Tiger - gg.
4. Eco: too much silvers. Everyone and his uncle can now spam tier IX and X games and why shouldn't they? Playerbase is spoiled by specials, personal reserves and whatnot. Additionally more and more people do no longer grind/buy new tanks and thus prem ammo is the only real silver sink left in the game.
I wait for the new large maps mode at tier X and if that one isn't cutting it, I'll be gone for good. WG will never change WoT for the better out of fear of breaking it and break it because of that.